Many companies today employ field representatives to provide services to remote locations. It is often difficult for the managing staff of a company to effectively keep track of all service activities performed by their field representatives, especially for those companies that utilize a relatively large number of field representatives covering vast geographic area. Some services requested by clients may be completed in one service visit while other requested services may require several and even many repeated visits before they are completed. Frequent service visits to the same facility location may indicate that some sort of proactive maintenance work is required. However, if managing staff fail to recognize the recurring problem within the same facility location, the required proactive maintenance work may be omitted or delayed, leading to inefficient operations.
One way to monitor field representatives is to equip fleet vehicles with global positioning system (GPS) equipment. The GPS periodically reports the vehicle's position to a central location. The positional information may be used to optimize the allocation of job assignments. One problem faced with the use of GPS in fleet vehicles is the difficulty associated with manually processing data from the GPS units to evaluate efficiency and to provide guidance on how to optimize operations in the future.